 A history of Boston in encyclopedic entries written, illustrated, and printedall by one man, engraver and flautist Nathaniel Dearborn (1786–1852), who first proposed the work in 1814. All manner of people, places, and historical events are here discussed in the work's extensive contents, including many societies, libraries, and museums. In addition to several in-text illustrations there are35 plates, many engraved by the author, with five folded to fit the text, as well assix maps of Boston, three of them folding. The engraved work is a mix of wood engraving and engraving on copper.

 Commemorative program honoring Rep. Michael J. Kirwan, Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, the leadership of the House and Senate, and the chairmen of the Standing Committees; the names of all of the former are given, along with the prominent players of the Congressional and Senatorial campaign committees. President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose portrait appears on the inside front wrapper, spoke at the dinner, which also featured entertainment by Carmel Quinn and a main course of filet mignon with pommes rissolées and French-cut string beans; the booklet closes with an exhortation regarding preparations for the 1966 elections.

 Publisher's very colorful (bright pink and bright green) printed paper wrappers; slightly cockled, small spot of staining to foot of front wrapper. A nice piece of political ephemera. (34158)

“Apology”NOT Accepted!

[Dexter, Franklin]. A letter to the Hon. Samuel A. Eliot, representative in Congress from the city of Boston, in reply to his apology for voting for the fugitive slave bill. Boston: Wm. Crosby & H.P. Nichols, 1851. 8vo. 57 pp.$165.00

 Given the hotbed of abolitionism that Boston was, during the three decades leading up to the Civil War, one must wonder what Eliot was thinking when he voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Act! Well, not wanting to leave his constituency in the dark, he wrote a defense of his action and published it in a letter to the Advertiser on 29 October 1850. His apology did not sit well with Dexter (here signing himself "Hancock"), who wrote this scathing rebuttal.

First edition.

 Sabin 19890; Dumond 63. Sewn, in original printed wrappers, slightly chipped. Five-digit number stamped on front wrapper, and a neat paper label at upper left corner. A very nice copy. (3123)

 “American Notes is the account of a love affair that went badly wrong”: So begins Angus Wilson's introduction to this Limited Editions Club edition of Dickens's report on his trip to America, which features visits to the Perkins Institution for the Blind, Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, the White House, etc., as well as Dickens's thoughts on slavery, public health, copyright, and other issues. It is illustrated with black-and-white sketches and a total of eight full-page watercolors by Raymond F. Houlihan, and designed by Richard Blumenthal who set the text in monotype Bulmer and Baskerville fonts.

This isnumbered copy 733 of 2000 printed, and is signed by the artist on the colophon. The L.E.C. prospectus is laid in.

Binding: Quarter tan calf over grey paper sides, with a gilt-stamped black leather title-label on the spine. The sides are decorated with line drawings by Houlihan in dark grey, framed in dark red.

 First edition. An exposé related to the Rev. Solomon Spaulding, whose “The Manuscript Found” is claimed by some to be the source of the Book of Mormon. With an introduction by Thurlow Reed. Publisher's catalogue in the back.

Beyond matters of authorship, there is quite a lot of general Mormon history here, including a good deal on polygamy; the perspective is not friendly.

Provenance: From the libraries of the Rev. C. C. Bitting and Crozer Theological Seminary.

 Flake & Draper 2832. Publisher's green cloth, spine chipped at head and foot. Title-page separated from binding, but present; shallow chipping along edges. Short closed tears to top edge of pp. 29–32 and 103–106 and outer edge of one page chipped; several page corners chipped/creased. Ex-library with bookplate, card and pocket, pressure-stamp on title-page, inked numeral, penciled notation, two rubber-stamps. A few penciled check-marks. (24434)

 New York “tenth edition” of this popular collection of proverbs by a Boston preacher highly thought of in his day; its original publication was in 1850, perhaps rather oddly in St. Louis, and it appeared thereafter in a variety of markets. Here, it is in a perfectly stunning American publisher's binding of gilt red morocco. Along with the “proverbs,” pithy preachings of the author, this offers parables and apocalyptic dreams.

 Binding as above, edges and extremities rubbed with leather chipped at spine head, spine somewhat darkened and with gilt dimmed (not lost); appearance of three small pin-type wormholes through leather at front joint, but this is associated with the sewing stations. Pages gently age-toned, with a few lightly foxed or stained; first few leaves loosening.Delightful lying on a table in 1856, delightful doing the same thing now. (15208)

San Francisco's Fin de SiècleBohemians — Entertaining UsMore than a CENTURY Later

Doxey, William; Gelett Burgess; & others. The Lark. San Francisco: William Doxey, 1895–97. Square 8vo. Each issue: [16] ff., and original wrappers. With the general title-leaves and added index leaves. [SOLD]

Click the images for enlargements.

 Complete run (nos. 1 through 24) of this trend-setting “little magazine,” bound in the publisher's handsome cloth bindings, including the Epilark issue, and retaining all original wrappers.

Issue 1 contains the famous “Purple Cow” poem with Burgess's illustration, here in the second issue. Received wisdom (i.e., no one knows from whom) is that the print run of the first issue was between 15 and 24 copies, only!

The Lark was put out by “Les Jeunes,” a fin de siècle clique of San Francisco aesthetes whose miscellany contained creative writing and interesting graphics in a variety of styles. Text and illustrations were printed on Asian paper; a few issues were printed in green, brown, or dark blue; and from issue 9 to the end, printing was on one side of a leaf only.

Issues 1 and 2 have thelaid-in photographs and 22 includes the separate leaflet supplement, “Vals de Monterey [sic] Viejo.” The first number, as noted, is the second issue, with Doxey's imprint; the second contains “relics” of R.L. Stevenson.

Binding: Publisher's muslin bindings designed by Florence Lundborg, with her monogram on vol. I; covers illustrated and printed in color, each volume with a different cover image.

 Publisher's cloth bindings, lightly rubbed; all wrappers present, that of Issue 15 with a large hole that appears actually to be a paper flaw, not “damage.” All pages untrimmed. A very nice set. (37159)

“Well . . . If This is True, We Only Tumbled Out of One Mystery into Another”

 First American and indeed first book edition of the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel; as with many of the Holmes stories, it was originally published as a serial for the Strand Magazine before it was published as a whole. The first American edition preceded the first UK edition by several months.

The present copy includes all seven illustrations, a frontispiece and six plates, by Arthur I. Keller; this seems not always to be true of copies on the market and the first UK printing lacks Keller's illustrations altogether.

 Dunbar wrote poems in both standard English and in “slave dialect”; the poems in this compilation are all in the latter style and all had been published previously, with exception of one. The best-known poem here, the title piece, is Dunbar’s paean to his mother and her spontaneous singing while doing household chores; it had first appeared in his self-published volume Major and minors, where it appeared in the “minors” section not because it was a minor piece but because it was in dialect.

The volume is “illustrated with photographs by the Hampton Institute Camera Club,” lovely and atmospheric; it has a binding designed and signed by Margaret Armstrong, and pale blue ornamental page borders by her as well.

Binding: Publisher's brown cloth, front board with Armstrong's design of a trellis entwined with a red flowering vine and with two scrolls; the larger scroll has a tan field bearing the title in gold and the smaller one has a field of the binding's brown bearing the author's name in gold. Top edge gilt.

 BAL 4948; Gullans & Espey, Checklist of Trade Bindings Designed by Margaret Armstrong, 73. Binding as above; as usual, without the d/j. Signs of something once having been pinned to front free endpaper, minor cracking in gutter between quires, else very good. (35379)

 First edition: Two intertwined stories of learning to love
again after loss, set at Christmas-time aboard the westbound express train from
Winnipeg. Written by a Canadian-born journalist, this sentimental tale (meant
for grownups who love children rather than the children themselves) is here
illustrated with a frontispiece and four plates by Elizabeth Shippen Green,
mounted on green paper, with additional in-text decorations done by Harold J.
Turner and printed in green.

 First edition. Dunlap (1766–1839) was “one of the first outstanding figures of the American stage” according to the Oxford Companion to the Theatre; sent to London to study painting with Benjamin West, he found the lure of the theatre more compelling and eventually became a playwright, manager of New York’s Park Theatre, and vice president of the National Academy of Design. Here reverting to his first “life,” he provides interesting biographical accounts, full of anecdotes and personal observations, of numerous prominent American artists and their works. Vol. I features a facsimile of an autograph bill of sale, for portraits, by John Singleton Copley.

 First edition, translated from the original French “by a member of the American Bar”: John Pickering (1777–1846), a lawyer and philologist. Salvador's Histoire des Institutions de Moise et du Peuple Hebreu included a chapter in which he concluded that as a court proceeding, the trial of Jesus was in accordance with Jewish law; Dupin here rebuts that chapter's arguments, while continuing to express admiration for Salvador as a scholar and author — and while focusing on legal issues rather than theological ones.

Evidence of readership: One pencilled footnote, arguing that capital punishment is the will of the divine.

 American Imprints 55455. On the binding cloth, see: Krupp, Bookcloth in England and America, 1823–50, p. 40. Binding as above; spine and board edges gently faded, extremities rubbed. Mild to moderate foxing throughout. An interesting book in a good example of an early American cloth binding. (34765)

CRANBERRIES

Eastwood, B. A complete manual for the cultivation of the cranberry, with a description of the best varieties. New York: C.M. Saxton, Barker, & Co., 1860. 8vo. Engr. t.-p., 120 pp; 9 plts. $125.00

Click the images for enlargements.

 Early reprint, following the first edition of 1856.

 Publisher's embossed cloth, spine with gilt-stamped title; corners and spine extremities showing minor wear, with gilt oxidized. Front free endpaper with pencilled inscription; some page edges with small blotches. Binding very handsome in its subtle way. Impossible! to get a good image of! (12986)

 Prayers and contemplations printed for a Pennsylvania German audience and prefaced by recommendations from ministers of the Lutheran church and the Reformed Synod. The volume is divided into four parts, each with its own sectional title. Gott ist die reinste Liebe was first published in 1791, as a Catholic devotional; Eckartshausen's later mystical works were enthusiastically received by such groups as alchemists, Rosicrucians, and followers of Aleister Crowley.

 Second edition, revised andenlarged, following the 30-page first that appeared in 1878. Eells (1843–1907) was a missionary of the American Missionary Association.

Hymns here are chiefly in Chinook, but “[i]n this second edition a hymn has been added in each of the Skokomish, Nisqually, and Clallam languages, and also a medley in the four languages” (p. [3]). There are a total of 20 hymns, each given in English translation opposite the native language version. There is no music but the tune for each is specified.

Additionally present here are the Lord's Prayer (see our caption) and “A Blessing for Meals,” each in Chinook with interlinear English.

 Emory, Brevet Major of the Corps of Topographical Engineers and an outstanding surveyor and mapmaker, here provides a groundbreaking description of the terrain, flora and fauna, and peoples of the historic Southwest. J. Gregg Layne (Zamorano 80) says, “A library of Western Americana is incomplete without [Emory's report].”

The volume is illustrated with43 lithographed platesdone by Weber & Co., including a portrait of “A New Mexican Indian Woman,” a fish of the Gila River, a map of “the actions fought at San Pasqual in upper California between the Americans and Mexicans Dec. 6th & 7th 1846,” and a view of cliffside hieroglyphics, as well as a series of 14 botanical images.

Government document: 30th Congress, 1st Session. Senate. Executive document no. 7; Howes describes this as the second issue of an edition which appeared in the same year as the first. The present example does not include the oversized, folding map found in some copies; the plates here are, however, in the preferred state, attributed to Weber.

 Shoe manufactury was the Endicott-Johnson Company's business and it did well until market forces, especially foreign factories with cheap labor, caused an international upheaval, not just in shoe factories, but all U.S. manufacturing. Its longtime embrace of a particular version of welfare capitalism that it called the “Square Deal” makes it an interesting corporate case study.

This manuscript book offers detailed descriptions of leather preparation techniques and dye formulas as scattered throughout the volume on a total of 74 pages. Also recorded here are charts indicating numbers of hides dyed, as well as which colors were produced on which days. The colors of the 1920s are less common today and their names and details will convey a great deal to fashion historians: Muskox, Esquimo, Velour, Coffee Elk, and Box Brownstone, to list a few. Needless to say the dye color formulae were proprietary and consequently copies of them rare.

The loose leaves are not excised from the book but are a mix of internal company documents and communications received from suppliers.

Provenance: John Donnelly, whose name appears at the top of two loose leaf of technical tables laid in the bound volume.

An important, suggestive resource for 1920s fashion research, industrial chemistry of the period, and American shoe manufacturing.

 A stationer's blank book with lined paper; boards covered with a faux leather that is separating from them; good condition. The ten separate leaves have been removed from volume and are housed separately in a Mylar sleeve. (35989)

 Produced for export to Spanish America: First edition of this Spanish translation, printed the year after the English-language first edition. Everett served as the United States minister to Spain from 1825 through 1829, and was a frequent contributor to the North American Review before becoming the periodical’s owner and editor; here he examines the politics and potential development of the United States and of some of the European colonies of North America, in a work that received positive critical notice on both sides of the Atlantic — an unusual accomplishment for an American publication in that time period.